HARVEST
About the project
HARVEST (Harvesting Judicial Reservoirs of Resilience to Autocratization for Rebuilding Democracy in the Visegrad Four) is devoted to employ a multi-method approach towards locating reservoirs of judicial resilience to autocratization in the Visegrad Four. Focusing on constitutional courts (CCs), HARVEST supplements the prevalent focus on non-judicial sources of resilience or mechanisms operating at the level of the EU institutions. HARVEST pays considerable attention to the internal environment at the CCs and the ideas emerging in interaction between the actors within the CC as an entry point to understand their potential to challenge authoritarian leanings. Combining political science theories of democracy and courts with doctrinal and contextual studies of judicial decisions, HARVEST offers, for the first time in the 2000s, a close comparative study of the CCs in the Visegrad Four across divergent regime contexts and in interaction with EU law. HARVEST takes into consideration the political change surrounding the operation of the CCs in the region, among which some themselves have undergone autocratization, but their ambivalent role in further de-democratization of the political regime remains understudied. The project employs insights from global scholarship with particular attention on non-European contexts of democratic jurisdictions whose CCs face similar challenges.
Project period: July 2024 – June 2026
Funded by the Recovery and Resilience Plan as part of Next Generation EU (excellent researcher support scheme, project No. 09I03-03-V04-00240).
Principal investigator: Max Steuer, PhD.


Publications
Academic publications
Steuer, M. – Organ, J. forthcoming. Reductionism and Holism in European Union ‘Value Talk’: The Case of the Conference on the Future of Europe. In: ICON. ISSN 1474-2659.
Publications for a broader audience
Constitutional court performance and scholarly responsibility: reflections on a small jurisdiction. Law School Policy Review, December 2024.
Revenge in the Big Village: Slovakia’s Illiberalization and the Perils of Isolated Doctrine. Verfassungsblog, September 2024.
Presentations, talks by the PI
Academic presentations, talks:
2024 IPSA Work-in-Progress Sessions. Online. December 4 – 6, 2024. Paper presenter.
Models of Constitutional Judiciary. Charles University, Prague, Czechia & online. November 25 – 26, 2024. Invited presenter.
Indian Association of Social Science Institutions 23rd Annual Conference. BIT Mesra, India. October 25–27, 2024. Paper presenter and thematic session discussant.
Do we want the rule of law? Why (not)? Charles University in Prague, Czechia and online. October 11, 2024. Invited presenter.
3rd National Seminar on Constitutionalism in Contemporary Times. National Law University Jodhpur, India. September 7, 2024. Discussant: Constitutionalism in the Digital Era.
Public outreach:
Exploring New Dimension of Laws in Contemporary Era in National and International Legal Systems. Bankura University, India & online. December 17 – 18, 2024. Presenter.
Dynamics of International Law in the Current Global Order. Surendranath Law College, India & online. November 18, 2024. Presenter.
7th Transdisciplinary International Conference. Amity Law School, India & online. September 9 – 10, 2024. Presenter.